Not Even The Rain
by Miss Yvonne Hartman
Summary: 'Do you ever wish you could turn back time' Tollie, Tess/Alexander post Fortune, one-shot.


Not Even The Rain

Dedicated to HaveNoMercy xx

AN: Tess centric set after the Scion/Fortune episodes in season 10.

* * *

Lightening cracked the sky in two, followed by the deep rumble of close thunder. Tess Mercer shivered and pulled her grey cardigan tighter around her body and reached out to push the log further into the crackling fire with the end of the iron poker. The floor was cold on her legs, the iciness seeping through her pyjama pants and the penthouse had never felt so empty and isolated as it did now.

Alexander was gone. Now staying at the Kent Farm, in that warm yellow kitchen, an island in a sea of golden corn. She imagined the scene, the gangly teenager with his dark hair and cheeky smile, elbows on the breakfast counter. Lois burning dinner, Clark adjusting those stupid glasses he'd taken to wearing. Laughter. Everyone would be laughing and he would be in the centre of a whirlwind of hallowed _family_. It was better, it was so much better than this silent penthouse, than the creepy mansion, with its locked doors and bolted windows and all those ghosts. The mansion that was nothing but ash and crumbling rotting wood, courtesy of the fire he started.

Tess sighed and hugged her knees, feeling anxious in the new home she was trying to build for herself, staring into the fireplace that transformed everyday objects in the room into shadowy monsters. She had not hosted a penthouse warming party. She simply paid someone to source furniture and fill the place with new clothes, new shoes, new DVDs, all trying to replace what was irrevocably destroyed in her life.

It was better for him, she told herself, freezing her heart like she had been taught her whole life. It was better for Alexander, Conner, whatever he wanted to call himself. She gave him a chance to have a good life with a real family and he took it without a word of protest, without a single thought towards Tess.

She thinks about the little boy, so small he fit in her lap, leaning his head against her shoulder –_ I love you, Tess _– it was gone, long gone.

And she missed him. She missed him deeply and the pain in her chest would not stop, rolling and aching and gaping. She missed the sound of running feet, the inevitable shatter of ceramics, the laughter, the songs, the imaginary dragons he slayed. Prince Alexander, for he would always be Alexander to her - The boy she wished would never grow up.

She hates Clark and Lois, because once again they have what she does not, things she could never reclaim.

Tess drifts, she cannot stay in front of the fire anymore and so she floats through rooms, not really in reality. She turns on lights that banish shadows to the corners of rooms and leaves them blazing in her wake. She stands in the centre of the white music room, hearing the rain drum loudly on the windows and imagines shattering the violin against the wall, sending all the polished wood into tiny splinters. She has been meaning to learn how to play for the past decade, now it is just another decorative embellishment to her fantasy life, the one she sometimes pretends she is living, when her reality gets too unbearable. Tess cannot stay and hastily leaves the room before the dark eyed girl inside could destroy anything.

Tess was angry again, her hands sparking with familiar rage. She wants Alexander back, she regrets her decision bitterly. She wants her youth and her heart and her hope back. She has lost so much, this ice queen, this broken doll. She deserves more than this hell she is living in.

Tess looked up when a different noise to the storm and the sounds of the house broke through her mind. She crossed the dark hallway, not accustomed to answering her own door; since no one ever visits her, and pulled the heavy wood a foot.

"Oliver?" she is surprised to see him, drenched from the storm outside, squinting into the darkness behind her. She opened the door wider, "what are you doing here? I thought you were in Star City."

"I'm here now." He replied. His eyes met hers and made her heart stop. He looked tired, thin in spite of his impressive stature. "Can I come in?"

Tess was never used to him asking permission. Oliver Queen takes what he wants, when he wants it, and Tess is surprised that there is such distance between them. She had expected him to smirk at her, invading her space and capturing her lips, entwining her into his hands the way he used to. She had not expected such questions to linger between them.

"Of course." She says, stepping back to admit him, "you poor thing, you're all wet."

He leaves grey footprints on the tiled floor as he followed her to the main room with the fireplace and white leather sofas. She left him in front of the fire, going to get him a towel and thinking – why is here? What does he want from me?

She returned her bare feet silent on the floor so she could observe the hunch of his shoulders and the way his clothes clung to his muscular arms, at odds with the masked hero she is familiar with.

"Here, your lips are blue." Tess holds out the towel which Oliver promptly buried his face in for minutes. "Oliver, it's good to see you but… why are you here?" she asks, her voice is so tiny in the enormous room. She feels tiny compared to him and wonders how they have both changed so much, because she never used to feel small in his presence.

Oliver sighed, reappearing from the towel and drying his short hair, then his arms. He is so tall. She suddenly sees Alexander at the same height, strapping and strong enough to lift her over his shoulder and spin her around in dizzy circles. And at the same time she sees Oliver when she first met him, young and tan and wonderful, without the tiredness in his eyes. The past and future collide before her eyes while she is unable to hold on to either of the most important men in her life. Everything slipping through her fingers, ash, ash, we are all ash.

"Oh just take your shirt off." Tess shook her head, and Oliver didn't waste a second in stripping off to his boxers. So some things were still the same. Tess handed him a blanket, trading him for the wet clothes and trying to force her eyes to meet his but not quite being able to. He was chiselled by the gods, but scarred, and her eyes ran the street map of injuries.

"See something you like?" he asked.

She smiled a little and said without sarcasm, "always."

He took the blanket and wrapped it around himself, "Thanks, Mercy."

Shaking her head slightly, she moved to the kitchen, throwing his clothes into the sink. "Why are you here? You didn't answer me before." She asked as she walked back.

He looked at her, "Lois called and told me about her… houseguest." He began and Tess' vision swam for a second. "I guess I just wanted to, to see you, really. I know how much you loved him."

Tess tried to deny it. "I wasn't… I… Alexander was my ward…" she did not want to admit to how she feels about that brilliant, tragic boy. The light she loved so deeply and so powerfully that she was overwhelmed by her own emotion. And something in her snapped and the tears sprang in her eyes, hot and burning. "I loved him. I never wanted to be a mother and then I found him and I _loved_ him, Oliver." She shook her head as Oliver pulled her into him, "all I wanted was to save him, to make him happy. He just needed to be loved and my love isn't enough."

"Who told you that?"

"Look at me, at everything I've done. I can't love anything. I just don't know how. I don't even know what love looks like, right? So in the end, Alexander didn't want to be with me." She choked out, gasping for breath. Oliver held her, whispering words against her hair that she could not hear. He pulled her closer to the fireplace when she started to shiver uncontrollably with grief and pain.

Eventually she pushed herself away and hid her face from him to wipe away her tears. "I just _can't_ anymore. I'm losing my grip on everything." She looked desperately at him. "Distract me, Oliver, I can't think about this anymore. Why are you back in Metropolis? Why do you look so… tired?"

Oliver watched as she regained her composure, the colour fading out of her cheeks even though her eyes stayed red.

"I think it's over. Or it soon will be, I have to end it. We're killing each other." He said.

Tess took a moment to work out what he was talking about. She thinks of Chloe in an apartment in Star City. Does she know Oliver is here, is she waiting for him to return? Or did she want him to go, throwing him out the door, her body trembling with rage.

"Oh." Was all she could say. "I thought you were married?"

Oliver shook his head negatively and Tess just said, 'Oh', again.

She doesn't know if she wants to ask, or even if she should, but she is aware that she is talking and questioning, and her hand is on his arm because it's easy to distract herself from her loss with his.

"Why now? What was it that made you leave?"

"I don't know, not exactly, it's seems... I guess I just couldn't see past it anymore. I thought I loved her but no matter how many nice things we do or how many times we forgive each other - oh my god the need for forgiveness! - I still see It."

"It?"

"It! I see her lies and the time she locked me in a coffin. I don't forget she stole money from my, our, company. And she will never let me forget that she traded her life for mine. She gave up her freedom to save me." He trailed off, gazing at Tess with hurt, alarmed eyes. "I never asked her to do that." He finished.

Tess was quiet, angling her body to the fireplace which blazed heat over her legs. She understood the inability to forget things about people. To forgive, yes, but not to truly see past what you know about someone. She knows that it is a part of the reason she can get no closer to the golden couple, why Alexander rejected her. She sighed. "I'm sorry." She thinks: I don't know what to say. I shouldn't have even asked. What does he want from me now?

"What for?"

She shrugged, encompassing everything and nothing in the graceful turn of her shoulders.

"Tess? Can I ask you something, what do you see when you look at me?"

She was still, her body freezing, she could have been made of marble. This flame haired Helen of Troy.

"How can you ask me something like that, Oliver? After everything you and I have done to us!" Oh she shouldn't say these things but a part of her wants to rip him to pieces, to inflict some of her misery onto him because it is too heavy for her beating heart. "I see a man who left me at a cafe telling me that he wouldn't save me, he would leave me to die." Her voice was harsh, like gravel rubbed over his skin. "But then…" her eyes softened and she sighed, "I also see a boy who threw himself between me and a gun, even when he didn't know me. I never can get over that." She shrugged again, seeing guilt and pain cross his face like clouds over the sun. "So I guess it all balances out." The abandon and the salvation.

"Into nothing?!"

"Or everything." She countered, because she cannot close herself off to him, not while his gaze unfolds every layer and petal of her being until she is naked before him. She does not want to know what he sees when he looks at her, she does not think she can bear it.

"I don't want us to be nothing, Tess." He said quietly. "You're the only thing I have left."

She has lost so much, damaged so many things that she is almost bewildered by him standing before her, offering up an alternative to her emptiness. She has lost him so many times, but somehow he is back.

Tess stepped forward and kissed him, hard, her lips catching fire only to be followed by the rest of her body and she holds onto it because it is so much better than feeling nothing. Oliver's hands swam through her hair, pulling her closer into their shared darkness where the only heat was from his lips and hands and the feel of their bodies pressed together and the soft punctuation of their ragged breathing.

He must love me quite a bit, Tess thinks, as Oliver tilts her jaw and makes her yearn for him, all of him, with all of her. She became aware of his hand making a steady ascension on the inside of her thigh as her own fingers made swift parades along his shoulders.

"Oliver." She breathes, feeling parts of her skin more acutely as he touches her gently, insistently, making her body bend and fall against him. The rain pounds against the windows as Oliver kisses her again and again, taking over her mind and body, making fire pool beneath her skin. It's not enough, it's too much. She wants to drown in him, in the ocean of time between them.

He pulled back, his lips glistening and his eyes closed. "Mercy." He whispered against her skin, making her shiver and wrap her arms tighter around him as above them thunder shook the windowpanes. She pulled him down to lie on the leather couch, fitting into his warm arms and breathing deep the scent of him.

"Lie here with me, for a moment." She said.

"I love you." he replied.

Tess blinked up at him, her green eyes obscured by complicated emotions. She put her hand on her cheek and kissed his lips. She wished she had been better, treated him better when she first saw him after so many years apart, when she was misguided by her rage and hurt. She wished she had been a better mother to Alexander. She wanted to be something worth loving.

"You don't seem happy about that?" Oliver remarked at her lingering silence.

"I am. I love you too, still. But I… do you ever wish you could turn back time?" she asked, smiling a little through new tears. It would take time, she knew, but the knowledge of their continued love for each other was enough for now.

Oliver chuckled, "Always. For certain things. You know, I wouldn't want to erase you or anything." This made Tess laugh lightly and press her body closer to his. She had thought they had changed so much, worlds apart from their former selves, but she could see they still wanted the same things, felt the same way.

"The rain's stopped." She said, tilting her head back, realising what the absence of sound meant.

Oliver studied her elegant profile. "Tess, you're still Alexander's mother. Sort of. What I meant is that nothing can change the fact that you found him, gave him a home and everything he could possibly want. I don't think his rejection is permanent, teenagers pull away from their parents…" he trailed off, and Tess put her arms around him again, knowing that he was thinking about his parents again. "Hey, if you want I'll chat to him, man to man."

"But I gave him away." She whispered. "It wasn't just a, 'Tess I want to leave'. _I_ drove him to Clark's house, and I drove away. I wanted him to have a chance, to live with a good role model who would help him. And that chance is not with me."

The silence between them was heavy, Oliver did not know what to say in response to Tess' confession. But she rolled into him, her lips on his neck, whispering, "I'm tired, Oliver."

He scooped her into his arms and carried her through the penthouse; many of the doors shut, or otherwise open onto empty rooms, until he found her bedroom and gently set her down on the white bed sheets, her hair spilling over the blankets like red wine.

"Things will be alright, Tess." Oliver said as he lay beside her, counting only one layer of her flimsy camisole between them, the heat of her body blazing against his. One layer.

"Will they?" she asked, her voice slow. "I guess you're right. There's so much darkness, so much pain in the life we're living, Oliver and I… I just wanted to be loved."

"I think that's what we all want, Clark and Lois and Emil too." Oliver replied, threading his fingers through her silky hair, "And for a long time we were trying to get that love from the wrong people."

"Yeah." She mused. "But maybe, maybe we're not destined for perfection. We just have a series of great moments and small victories that, maybe, lead up to everything being okay one day."

She closed her eyes and rested her hand on his chest, loving the feel of him in her arms and the soft lull of his breathing.

"Stay, please? I don't want you to go just now." Her fingers laced with his, bringing their hands up to rest on the mattress in the space between their chests. Oliver settled deeper into the bed, reaching forwards to press a kiss to Tess' forehead.

"Okay?" he asked.

"Okay." She answered.

_Fin_

AN: Yay, John Green reference at the end there! The title of this piece is taken from 'somewhere i have never travelled' by e.e. cummings.


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